This reminds me of some experiments we toyed with a few years back, before Twitter existed. The idea was to set up some sort of feedburner which aggregates posts on EU issues based on commonly agreed, yet author-added tags. Like bloggingportal, but semi-automated.

Such an aggregator faces a real chicken and egg problem, of course.

Being a single platform, Twitter provides the single ecosystem for that Darwinian effect operating on hashtags. I imagine that a set of hashtags will emerge from that process this year.

It can’t come soon enough – once we have a real lexicon of hashtags used to process tweets pointing to more detailed blogposts, the conversation will hopefully move both upwards and outwards.

But then, what stops us blogging Eurogeeks from pointing them kindly in the right direction?

And if the pointing does not help we might just retweet the hashtagfree Tweets with the hashtag attached :)

As things stand, hashtags have a pleasing Darwinian dimension too. This applies internally too. We wouldn’t dream, for instance, of trying to tell MEPs, political groups et al how to tweet, so the question is whether the official EP twitter feeds, as we currently use them, have the “weight” to define hashtags. I wonder. We dipped a toe in this water when we tweeted Question Time last time round, using the tag #epqt. No-one picked it up and we got a little demoralised. However, you are right that we should try, especially as a euro-twitter community seems to be slowly impinging on the collective consciousness, and we should be more assiduous about picking up tags that are already out there. So, let’s just say thanks for the very pertinent suggestion, and we will do our best!

This post was mentioned on Twitter by Tayebot: Steve’s views on new incomers on #Twitter on our team’s blog. “Twittering the hearings” http://bit.ly/9yfgg0...